[atleastoptimal]

I was concerned originally when I heard that Anthropic, who often professed to being the "good guy" AI company who would always prioritize human welfare, opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon in the first place.

The devil's advocate position in their favor I imagine would be that they believe some AI lab would inevitably be the one to serve the military industrial complex, and overall it's better that the one with the most inflexible moral code be the one to do it.

[Synaesthesia]

AI was always particularly well suited to military use and mass surveillance. It can take huge amounts of raw data and parse it for your, provide useful information from that. And let's face it, companies exist for profit.

[scottyah]

True, and that has been going on for awhile now. But what does that have to do with Anthropic's genai chatbots with comparatively tiny context windows?

[dheera]

> opted to sell priority access to their models to the Pentagon

The bottom of all of this is that companies need to profit to sustain themselves. If "y'all" (the users) don't buy enough of their products, they will seek new sources of revenue.

This applies to any company who has external investors and shareholders, regardless of their day 0 messaging. When push comes to shove and their survival is threatened, any customer is better than no customer.

It's very possible that $20 Claude subscriptions isn't delivering on multiple billions in investment.

The only companies that can truly hold to their missions are those that (a) don't need to profit to survive, e.g. lifestyle businesses of rich people (b) wholly owned by owners and employees and have no fiduciary duty.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Anthropic cares first and foremost about extinction risk. This is not what everyone who professes to care about human welfare thinks should be at the top of the priority list. See e.g. the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement for an example of a humanistic approach to letting humanity die off with no replacement.

One of the most challenging problems in AI safety re/ x-risk is that even if you can get one country to do the right thing, getting multiple countries on board is an entirely different ballgame. Some amount of intentional coercion is inevitable.

On the low end, you could pay bounties to international bounty hunters who extract foreign AI researchers in a manner similar to an FBI's most wanted lost, and let AI researchers quickly do the math and realize there are a million other well paid jobs that don't come with this flight risk. On the high end you can go to war and kill everyone. Whatever gets the job done.

Either way, if you want to win at enforcing a new kind of international coercion, you need to be at the top of the pack militarily and economically speaking. That is the true goal here, and I don't think one can make coherent sense out of what Anthropic is doing without keeping that in the back of their mind at all times.

[presentation]

So your stance is that anything military-related is immoral?